Federal incentives and requirements under the Obama administration spurred states to adopt major reforms to their teacher evaluation systems. We examine the effects of these reforms on student achievement and attainment at a national scale by exploiting their staggered implementation across states. We find precisely estimated null effects, on…

It is now clear that the original promise to anchor K-12 education to higher education and backmap the Common Core Mathematics Standards (CCMS) from the upper grades down to the primary grades was empty rhetoric. Higher education has scarcely been involved at all, with the exception of the institutions that agreed to place high school students who…

The stakes of large-scale testing programs have grown considerably in the past decade with the enactment of the No Child Left Behind (NCLB) and Race To The Top (RTTT) legislations. A significant component of NCLB has been required reporting of annual yearly progress (AYP) of student subgroups disaggregated by sex, special education status, English…

The evidence is clear: better teachers improve student outcomes, ranging from test scores to college attendance rates to career earnings. Federal policy has begun to catch up with these findings in its recent shift from an effort to ensure that all teachers have traditional credentials to policies intended to incentivize states to evaluate and…

This edition of the Brown Center Report marks the tenth issue of the series and the final issue of Volume II. The publication began in 2000 with Bill Clinton in the White House and the Bush-Gore presidential campaign building toward its dramatic conclusion. That first report was organized in a three-part structure that all subsequent Brown Center…